I am curios to know how you reacted when you first saw Test Automation in action?
Now I do not mean implementing a test script, I mean being the audience.
Where you curios? Did you want to know how it is done? Did you think it was magic? Were you afraid that it will take your job 
?
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I felt the same way as I did when I was a robot control driver developer and one customer walks in and says all these robots are really the same, so I said “yes they roughly are”. They all use very simple instruction sets and all do the same thing I say. He pipes up and says, the control instructions for them will one day be interpreted by an AI… And an AI will do this for you. I entertained the thought for a fortnight and then realized it was really an impossible dream. That was about 20 years ago. Still an impossible dream.
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I try to remember … It was a long time ago.
I was curious how it was done and wondered what capacities it had. And what where common problems.
I was quite prosaic, mostly technical interested.
I was not afraid about losing my job.
I was happy to get this tool so I don’t have to bother with boring repetition and cover more cases and speed things up.
(There is no test automation, automation is a tool for execution and checking in testing. Testing is much more than that.)
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My first thought when I saw an automation framework was: “Hey, this looks just like coding in Visual Studio!” 
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At first it was exciting, then it became a race against the clock since my company is wanting to outsource it, which isn’t bad. But, I know if the test automation breaks it isn’t that company’s highest priority in fixing…
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“What is this black magik ? I want to learn this.”
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My initial thoughts were:
- That’s cool.
- How can I use this to stop doing repetitive and boring tasks?
- I wonder how it breaks.
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I never saw it until I tried it.
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There’s a certain cool joy to be had from an automated test suite running the UI at top speed as you sip coffee and watch its progress on a big screen in a busy office
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To give an update, I beat the other company in the race to create test automation. It still hasn’t been approved because those in charge don’t want to admit it is a valuable tool. I still use it. With it, I was able to do testing that would usually take me three days of continuous testing in one day. The only reason it took me so long was that it wasn’t my project, it was something I worked on in secret.
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Mine is a sad, sad tale… I was nonplussed; dumbfounded. There was an absence of any kind of coherence/architecture to it. It worked, but wasn’t documented. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything quite so impenetrable as the first test automation I encountered. The people who made it (collectively known as The Buzzwords) left soon after. It turned out the mishmash of technologies they’d employed were good for the CV.
That said, it was useful. It worked as long as it was needed, and it was a great teacher. As a teacher it taught there is lot to learn, that it is not always obvious in what order one should learn things and, most importantly, how absolutely not to implement automation.
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This exact tale tallies with the experiences of many @darth_piriteze , my second automation job started in that exact state. Whaaa! Yes, pretty much exactly in every detail. I was lucky, my prior job had a well designed CI/CD for embedded device testing, so I was wise to the smoke and mirrors of it.
My first job had me building exploration tools for manufacturing control software, so I was lucky to have a gentle intro because those were the days before CI/CD. But basically the more people you put on a problem, in an isolated box, the more prosaic we can make it was, my initial view.
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